


like a raw wound looming

by sublime_jumbles



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Comfort Eating, Depression, Flashbacks, Gen, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, One Shot, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Suicidal Thoughts, Weight Gain, binge eating, chubby!raleigh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-22
Updated: 2014-05-22
Packaged: 2018-01-26 03:26:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1672949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sublime_jumbles/pseuds/sublime_jumbles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Raleigh struggles through another K-Day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	like a raw wound looming

August fifteenth is the most dangerous day of the year, like a raw wound looming on the calendar, big enough for him to see it coming, but brutal enough to steamroll his progress every single year. He’s always astonished by how the population of Anchorage seems to double when K-Day rolls around, how there are so many of them ready and willing to celebrate an event that killed so many people, that heralded the beginning of a war. Sure, it’s the day they finally took down Trespasser, but nobody seems to remember that that entailed three nuclear missiles and thousands of civilian casualties. It’s no cause for celebration, Raleigh thinks, peering out at the parades in the street from his apartment window. He rubs his eyes, tries to brush the sting away. People _died_ for this. People died on this mission, people have died on every mission since, and he let _Yancy_ die on one of these missions, and he can’t think of a greater disrespect to these people’s memories than to celebrate goddamn _Kaiju Day_.

It churns inside him, an anger that inevitably boils away to gnawing, inescapable sadness. These are the days he locks the steak knives and razors and scissors in the safe in his closet, pushes his dresser in front of the door so it’s harder to get to. He doesn’t trust himself like this, when the grief settles in his chest and below his eyes, afraid of how reckless he feels. These are the days he longs to be behind the wheel of the pickup he and Yancy used to share, longs to be behind the wheel of any car, and can too easily picture himself driving out into the barren Alaskan wilderness and running himself into a tree, cracking the ice on a pond and just _sinking_. The possibilities overwhelm him, sometimes, with their abundance and ease.

He’s not seeing anyone about this, thinks maybe he should be, but he can’t bring himself to make an appointment, especially this time of year. He can’t tolerate the thought of going to the trouble of finding a doctor and setting something up and then – well, not _making_ it.

His first K-Day without Yancy, he’d gone to visit his father, afraid to be on his own. The flashbacks had been getting worse, the depression chewing at him, and two razor wounds on his left arm were healing slowly. He’d woken up from a black nightmare three nights before, frenzied and sobbing and wild, Yancy’s voice screaming in his ears, and all he’d wanted to do was follow him, and the only thing that saved him, he thinks, was that his hands were clumsy with sleep, couldn’t press too hard. He woke up dizzy the next morning, blood on the sheets, on his T-shirt, and bandaged himself, humiliated and aching and ashamed. 

His father had hugged him before even saying hello, held onto him like he was slipping and only he could pull him back to safety. Raleigh kept his sleeves rolled down; no reason to worry him. 

They didn’t say much during his visit; Raleigh is quiet these days, fooled by solitude into thinking he’s got nothing to say. Even his father's company felt strange, foreign, and Raleigh spent most of the weekend with his eyes lowered, keeping himself full of his father's thick potato soup, the one he’d made for Christmases and snow days when he and Yancy were kids. The warm weight in his belly was comforting, a kind of grounding force, keeping him centered and lazy. He thinks this is where it started, his habit of calming the panic by filling his stomach. This is how his abs began to soften until they became a roll of dough on his hips, how he fell even deeper into himself – days composed of bad TV and blankets and bags of junk food, preferring the musty dark of his apartment to Alaska’s chilly sunlight.

He doesn’t like the way he looks now, exactly, but he thinks that he finally looks the way he feels: sluggish, pathetic, too much dead weight for anyone to bother with. There’s a kind of peace that comes with realizing that he no longer looks like someone who is expected to impress. He looks like someone who makes mistakes now, and that feels appropriate. Although he wouldn’t call the weight a mistake, exactly – more like an accident he hasn’t had the energy to fix. But it’s got his benefits, he has to admit. There’s no way he’d fit into his drift suit now, no way Pentecost will come recruiting after one look at him, no way _anyone_ would look at him and think he’d make a suitable pilot. He won’t be able to endanger anyone else’s lives that way.

– _Take it, Raleigh_ , Yancy shouts in his head.

– _I got this_ , Raleigh assures him, too cocky, too confident, too certain. A wave of nausea crests in his stomach, and he squeezes his eyes shut as the flashback hits him again.

He rides it out, as he’s trained himself to do, and it still leaves him raw and cold and drenched with sweat, the scars along his arms and chest feeling like they’ve been ripped open, and a pit opens inside his gut, threatens to swallow him. His heartbeat throbs in his ears, mocking, carrying him through the shockwave silence. 

Outside his apartment, there is cheering. 

He and Yancy celebrated, once – their first K-Day as Rangers. They’d gone out to some bar near the base, come home rollicking drunk and caused so much of a ruckus that Pentecost had dragged them into his office and explained to the two of them, in no uncertain terms, that K-Day was _not_ a cause for celebration, that his sister Luna had died during the first attack, that this was a day to mourn, not to get trashed and parade around the city _like some bastards did_. The Becket brothers had looked at him, somber, shamed into silence, until Raleigh hiccupped and Pentecost, disgusted, had dismissed them both.

Today Raleigh began drinking at two p.m. It’s five-thirty now; he’s gone through a six-pack and a half of the good beers Yancy used to like, Blue Moon. He doesn’t drink much these days, and when he does it goes straight to his head. He prefers whiskey, usually – slows him down without making him feel too heavy – but today he needs slow and heavy. 

He tucks himself in one corner of the couch, knees up at his chest, wrapped in blankets, head spinning. The beer makes everything throb, and he’s not drunk enough for it to feel good yet. The scope of his consciousness has narrowed to the night of Knifehead’s attack, and he doesn’t have enough purchase over his thoughts to push it wider. Despite the blankets, he is freezing, can feel the icy blades of surf burying themselves in his flesh. His heart beats _Raleigh, take it, got this, Yancy, Yancy, Yancy_.

He swills another beer, doesn’t feel any better. _It should have been you_ , his brain tells him, and he nods to himself. It’s true. _He was the better pilot. You deserved it, not him_.

_I know_ , he thinks, feeling the first hot tears spill down his cheeks. _I know_.

_You killed him_ , his brain tells him, fierce, accusing. _You killed a good man. Imagine what he could have done for the war. Look at yourself. What are you doing for it? You’re worthless like this._

_I know_ , he sobs. _I know. I know. I know_.

He clenches his fists, chews up his lips, presses the heels of his hands into his eyes until he can’t take the pain. It doesn’t help.

He can’t catch his damn breath, has to use the damn internet to order the damn pizza because he can’t stop crying long enough to do it like a damn human, and that doesn’t help either.

By the time the pizza arrives, there are two beers left in the second six-pack, and he’s drifting. He’s in and out of his head, dragged under by flashback one second, cowering on the couch the next, and when he hauls himself up to answer the door, he sways, recalibrating.

The delivery girl squints as he pays for the pizzas. “Raleigh Becket?” she asks – and it’s no wonder she’s squinting, the way he must look – and he blushes, keeps his eyes on the ground. The name on the order is Richard Banks.

“No,” he says quietly. “Wrong guy.”

She nods, still staring, and he pushes a ten into her hand before he shuts the door and stumbles back to the couch. He clumsily spreads one of his blankets on the cushion beside his so the grease doesn’t bleed through to the fabric, then places the boxes – one sausage, Yancy’s favorite, and one extra cheese, his own – within easy reach. 

He tries to pace himself, but he’s too drunk for that – after the first two slices he can’t get them down fast enough, folding them in half and stuffing them into his mouth, sloppy and desperate, unsure if his breath is hitching or if he’s still crying. He eats well past the point of comfort, eats until he can’t stand up, until he can’t move, until he can barely exhale without groaning.

When both boxes are empty, save for a few dry crusts he tossed aside, he leans back, burps, spreads his legs to give his stomach more room to bloat, and burps again, greasy and a little sick, but satisfied. There’s no way he’s getting off this couch now, no way for him to put himself in danger.

He drops a hand over the arm of the couch, groping until his fingers catch the neck of another beer. He pops off the cap, gulps at it messily. His stomach gurgles in protest, but he chugs it down anyway, then another, until he’s dizzy. Sleepy, dizzy, overfull – each one a guarantee to keep himself alive until this morbid, godforsaken holiday is over.

He falls asleep not long after, looking for all the world a sorry sight: washed-up pilot passed out on his couch, bloated and unshaven, belly pooching out between holey undershirt and faded sweatpants, two empty pizza boxes on the cushion beside him, two empty six-packs on the floor, too drunk and overstuffed to even make it to bed. But when he finally wakes up the next afternoon – mouth fuzzy, head pounding, stomach aching – the streets are quiet, and so is his mind. It’s drizzling a little, and he stands at the window for a long time, taking a mental inventory, making sure everything is as it should be.

There is no recklessness today. His body feels spent, shoulders knotted from sleeping upright, muscles stiff and sore. This happens sometimes – even if he’s done nothing more than sit on the couch, when the flashbacks get bad, his body recalls the way it felt when he finally staggered out of Gipsy, exhausted, ripped open, and imitates it.

He rubs his eyes, wanders into the kitchen. He fills a mug for tea, sticks it into the microwave, pours himself a glass of cold water and drains it while the mug heats up.

While the tea steeps, he moves his dresser back into place and opens the safe. He returns them to their proper places, saving the knives for last, laying them neatly in their slots in the drawer near the sink. _Not today_ , he thinks, and he takes his mug of tea back to the window.

**Author's Note:**

> you can read more of my fic at alittlepudge-neverhurtnobody.tumblr.com!


End file.
